Dear investor,

Ever seen those cringe LinkedIn posts where someone bends over backwards to link random events to venture capital? Like this guy, using a 16-year-old soccer star to draw lessons for investors.

Please don’t be like this guy! It’s ridiculous.

Today’s stories: Convert Trials into Customers w/ Bont; Drug Discovery With AI & Quantum Mechanics w/ Ångström

This time, I'm bringing you two startups with four founders each. And for those who bitched about my focus on German startups, I have something fresh from Switzerland and the US. Get ready to explore these innovative companies!

1. Bont

#B2B #SaaS #Sales #AI

How many of your portfolio companies miss a chance to turn a trial user into a loyal customer or fail to upsell an existing one? That's a company’s nightmare and a sales team's biggest failure.

Missing those crucial signals can cost a fortune and there should be a tool that never lets these golden opportunities slip through the fingers.

This is where the team at Bont.ai steps in. Bont is a customer intelligence platform that boosts revenue by converting trial users and upselling existing customers through data-driven insights.

It captures signals across various channels to provide actionable insights for customer-facing teams.

Why are they interesting?

Picture this: a sales rep, Marko, gets an alert from Bont.ai highlighting a trial user who's been highly engaged with key features.

Instead of cold calling random leads, Marko reaches out to this hot prospect, armed with data. He converts the trial into a paying customer and everyone’s happy, especially Marko with the performance bonus.

This targeted, data-driven action makes Bont.ai so compelling—it turns potential into profit seamlessly.

But they don’t stop here! Bont integrates with product analytics and marketing tools to identify upsell opportunities, monitor active users, and prevent revenue loss by customizing retention strategies.

It offers sales, marketing, and revenue operations solutions, helping teams convert buying signals into actions, automate playbooks, and deliver accurate forecasts.

Stop relying on guesswork and introduce a streamlined, efficient sales process to your team!

The team

Dennis Teichmann (CEO) is a tech-savvy problem solver with a track record of turning ideas into successful ventures. He scaled and exited an HR tech startup, Jacando, and now leads bont.ai, a cutting-edge sales intelligence platform.

Nik Peric (CTO) has over 10 years in software architecture and backend development, he was the Head of the Backend at Properti where he led a team to launch a property search platform in Switzerland in just two months.

Neha Gupta (CPO) has been crushing the SaaS sales game for over 12 years. She’s led go-to-market teams across the US, Europe, Israel, and ANZ, with stints at Multiplier and Wingman before it was acquired by Clari.

Romea Müller (CMO) is a marketing expert with years of experience in content creation and inbound strategy. As the Marketing Lead at jacando and now the CMO of bont.ai, she’s known for building effective marketing strategies and driving lead-to-sale success.

Traction & Ask

CHF 36B TAM

The market size for bont.ai is CHF 36 billion. They are currently at the pre-revenue stage, with an MVP built and validated together with their customers.

Right now, they are building up their customer pipeline and expect to have their first paying customer by the end of Q3.

Raising CHF 500K with 200K already in the pocket

Bont.ai has been bootstrapped and is now raising CHF 500K. With CHF 200K already committed, they're looking to close the remaining amount quickly. This is your chance to join an exciting pre-revenue stage startup with a validated MVP and a promising customer pipeline.

Contact

Bont is located in Bern, Switzerland. To connect with Dennis, you can email him directly at [email protected] or book a meeting through this link.

Follow them on LinkedIn.

Don't miss out on this opportunity just because you are on a 6-week vacation.

2. Ångström

#biotech, “pharma #drug_discovery, #ai

Making drugs is expensive! For my Berlin readers, not that ones. The cost of developing a new medication in 2024 is around $2.3 billion, according to Deloitte.¹ 

In drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies must understand how drug molecules interact with other molecules in the body to assess their efficacy and safety.

Traditional methods, like wet lab experiments, are accurate but slow and expensive. Machine learning predictions, like AlphaFold, while faster, often lack accuracy due to limited training data.

However, there's a groundbreaking approach that combines quantum mechanics and generative AI, making molecular simulations both fast and precise.

Curious?

Here’s my answer to you: Ångström!

No, this is not an F you in old Norse. Angstrom is a unit of length, equal to 10⁻¹⁰ metres, or 0.1 nanometre.

Meet Ångström, a startup that specializes in AI-driven simulations for the pharma and biotech industries, offering rapid and precise predictions of molecular interactions. Their cutting-edge technology can tell if a drug will bind to a protein and how quickly it will take effect in a patient.

Why are they interesting?

Ångström is intriguing because it combines quantum physics and AI to make drug discovery faster and more accurate. Instead of traditional methods, Ångström uses a unique model called MACE, developed by their co-founder Gabor, which mimics real molecular interactions very accurately.

Although MACE is powerful, it requires a lot of computing power. To speed things up, they use AI diffusion models to run these complex simulations more efficiently.

Imagine predicting how a drug works in the body faster than ever before—that's the game-changer here!

The team

The team comes from the University of Cambridge and packs over 30 years of combined experience in AI and Molecular Modelling.

Javier Antorán (CEO) supercharged probabilistic AI methods by 1000x during his PhD and turned down a lucrative research scientist position at a big tech company to co-found this startup! With research stints at Stanford, the University of Amsterdam, and Google, he brings top-tier experience.

Laurence Midgley (CTO) during his PhD created FAB, a groundbreaking method for training AIs using physical equations without training data. Before joining Ångström, he was a researcher at InstaDeep, which BioNTech acquired in 2023.

Miguel Hernández-Lobato (C AI O) is the PhD supervisor of Javier and Laurence. He is an author of foundational research in AI for drug discovery and generative modeling.

Gábor Csányi, developed MACE, the first quantum-mechanically accurate machine-learning model of atomic interactions.

Miguel and Gabor's work has been cited over 40k times.

Traction & Ask

They just got accepted to the Y Combinator batch and at the moment they are looking for:

• A pharma or biotech company interested in understanding the basics of diffusion models and quantum-mechanically accurate atomic interactions.

• your friends who work in pharma or biotech and are interested in computational methods.

Do you know anyone who might be interested in connecting with these guys?

Contact

They are based in San Francisco, USA and you can reach out to them directly at [email protected] 

Follow them on LinkedIn.

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Summer Break: Newsletter on Pause

I've decided to hit pause on the newsletter during the sizzling summer months.

Let's face it, you're probably lounging on a tropical beach or cooling off with some cold plunges and margaritas. Plus, summer isn’t exactly prime time for deal-making and fundraising (learned that the hard way last year).

Everyone’s gearing up for a full-throttle September. That's when I'll be back with exciting updates about my startup, Luccid.

Until then, enjoy your summer, and let's connect on LinkedIn!👇🏻